It's a foggy, cool weekend here in the city by the bay. My nine-year-old and I visited a non-profit outlet called "Scraps," in the warehouse district between Bernal Hill and Bayview. For six bucks, we loaded up on pieces of cloth, paper, wood, glass, and other castaways from our wasteful consumer culture; then came back home to recycle our acquisitions into something new.
Back home, we looked at the old pistol and pipe dug out of our 1890's privy by the S.F. Historical Museum two summers back. We've taken care of these relics; they are in the same shape as when we recovered them.
Out back, there are clusters of cherry tomatoes reaching their orange stage -- my favorite color in their ripening cycle.
Our wax bird was illuminated by the late-afternoon sun that broke through our fog soup.
Out front, the pink roses next door open, bloom, age and die in a colorful display of the cycle of life.
Inside, my little designer and I completed this room in what we eventually hope to be able to call a house. It's a beach cottage, with an exterior painted blue (at her insistence). It therefore recreates one of the happiest moments in my life, although she is utterly unaware of it. The late '80s, spending chunks of every summer in our inherited cottage on the beach at Sanibel Island, Florida. I'd work all day, writing this book or that, while my older kids grew up in paradise.
In the afternoons, while the kids played inside our little blue cottage looking out at the Bay, I would rewrite and edit my day's work. By late afternoon, it was time to party, and there were multiple ways to do that on Sanibel. I remember driving my kids over to their friends' parent's house, music blaring.
In retrospect, it never gets better than that. Never.
That's what my blissfully naive 9-year-old doesn't know -- the memories she is triggering within me -- as we create this little blue beach cottage together, or maybe somehow, on a deeper, more intuitive level, she does.
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